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MidwestRoots.net
Professional Genealogy Services for the Midwest, by Harold Henderson, CG (SM).

Certified Genealogist and CG are proprietary service marks
of the Board for Certification of Genealogists® used by the
Board to identify its program of genealogical competency
evaluation and used under license by the Board’s associates.

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Monday, September 30, 2013

Historian Scott E. Casper writes about US biography in the 1800s -- not just high-toned biographies of famous people, but also the "mug books" that portrayed a partial slice of a county, region, state, or ethnicity late in the century.

Goodspeed's book identified approximately 120 residents of Clay County, Arkansas, by occupation. Just over two-fifths were described as "farmer" or "farmer and stockman." About a third were engaged in small-town commerce as "manufacturer," "merchant," or simply "business man." The rest included local officeholders . . . and professional men.

Quite aside from the absence of women, the books also slighted urban life. In Lancaster County, Nebraska, the city of Lincoln grew from 13,000 to 55,000 people during the 1880s, much faster than the countryside.

Although Lincoln dwellers comprised more than two-thirds of the county's population when the Chapman team came to Nebraska, only about a fifth of the biographies treated Lincoln residents. Like urban dwellers elsewhere, most ordinary Lincolnites had not (or not yet) distinguished themselves in business or in agriculture. And mug books did not seek primarily to record urban history; they were records of rural and small-town accomplishment. . . .

No matter how fully genealogy appeared in the biographies, it did not determine destiny. Above all, the subject prospered from his own handiwork. . . . Even as these stories expressed individuals' pride in their achievements, they also combined to tell a national history.

For this reason the books often began with biographies and portraits of presidents and governors.

White ethnics like Germans were included, but African-Americans as a rule were on their own. Their mug books were often less local and foregrounded the author more, but the underlying motif was similar. As William J. Simmons put it in 1887, "I wish the book to show to the world -- to our oppressors and even our friends -- that the Negro race is still alive."

Casper is studying the phenomenon, not evaluating evidence. His examination suggests that information likely to be missing in these celebratory sources include failures, difficulties never fully surmounted, conflict, and above all any indication of dependence on outside government aid (such as surveying, military procurement, Indian expulsion, and building harbors, roads, and canals) -- anything that might cast doubt on the story of the self-made man.

Friday, September 27, 2013

. . . it takes some effort to recall the flexibility of borders in generations past. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase [1803], what we think of as the deep South was really the Far West. At time of the Monroe doctrine [1825], Texas was part of Mexico, and Oregon jointly administered by Britain. At the time of the Gold Rush [1849], the fastest way to get to California involved going south to Central America, crossing the isthmus, and sailing up the Pacific coast. What all this meant was that, if you looked at the world from New Orleans or Natchez, you didn't necessarily see the future of your country in the West.

Nathaniel Philbrick on teenagers 200 years ago:

Today it is difficult to appreciate the level of patriotism commonly felt by those of Wilkes's generation [born 1798], many of whose fathers were fighting in the War of 1812 and whose grandfathers had fought in the Revolution.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

I haven't attended this institute, but I have heard good things about it, and the enrollment deadline is close:

Don’t Miss Your Opportunity to Study With The Experts!
If you’re a last-minute Lilly (or Louie), there is still time to register for the few remaining
open spots to attend the British Institute in Salt Lake City, 7-11 October 2013.
The International Society for British Genealogy and Family History will accept registrations
until Monday, 30 September, for a week of lectures and mentoring by well-known British
genealogists Graham Walter, Maggie Loughran and Paul Blake.
The registration fee is $495, and covers five days of instruction with morning lectures and
afternoon research opportunities in the Family History Library, including one-on-one
mentoring with your instructor.
All courses will be in the Radisson Hotel Downtown, a short walk to the Family History
Library. Hotel rooms are still available at the Crystal Inn at $79.00 per night, including
breakfast and shuttle bus service to and from the airport, and to the Radisson each day.Full details and registration at

Two of the four courses still had room as of yesterday morning:

Sources For Tracing Pre-mid-nineteenth Century English Ancestors – Maggie Loughran and Paul Blake

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Historians have issues with evidence evaluation, too. Here's the nautical metaphor that China scholar Jonathan D. Spence used to introduce his collection of Western "sightings" of China over the past 800 years:

We must imagine our pilots and navigators . . . holding rather simple instruments in their hands as they make their sightings. Furthermore, the hands that hold the instruments are often chapped with cold or sleek with sweat. Our guides are standing on sloping decks that shift angle without warning, and are often blinded by a burst of spray or dazzled by an unexpected dart from the previously beclouded sun. (xviii)

His subsequent discussion of the endlessly receding mystery of Marco Polo's account of China forced me to reconsider the idea that historians deal only in generalities and so don't have to worry about particular facts the way genealogists do.

Monday, September 23, 2013

The first thing we learn about federal records is that very few of them are indexed by name. To make progress, we usually need to know the military unit or the federal department involved. But there are so many federal records that the exceptions themselves can be numerous. Sometimes National Archives employees have created helpful name indexes in certain record groups. Here are a dozen online name indexes from records held at the Chicago (Great Lakes) branch. Visit their page of on-line finding aids for more clues as to the wealth of information cached south of Midway Airport.

RG 15, Records of the Veterans Administration
Records of the National Home for
Disabled Soldiers and the
National Homes Service of the Veteran Administration:

Friday, September 20, 2013

Very thoroughly -- more thoroughly even than if we had found something.

Compare these reports:

(1) "I went to the courthouse and I couldn't find any of my ancestors."

(2) "I went to the courthouse and I couldn't find any Packmans."

(3) "I went to the recorder's office and I couldn't find any Packmans."

(4) "I looked for Packmans in the grantor and grantee indexes from the beginning of the county up to 1850, and didn't find any. I didn't have time to check the mortgagee and mortgagor indexes."

Whether we're reporting to our future self, or to a friend or client, only something as specific as #4 is acceptable. Why? Common sense and courtesy. (You can invoke the standards of the field, but in this case you can reach the same conclusion on more basic grounds.) If someone doesn't believe us, how can they check up on 1 or 2 or 3? If later on we can't remember what we did and didn't do in the recorder's office -- only that the place was airy and well-designed and not flooded with oil and gas men -- then we will speak ill of our former selves and have to do the work over again. The same applies, in spades, to research on the internet.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

A new task reminded me of how easy genealogy can seem when everyone is where they're supposed to be, the census records are consistent, and the births, marriages, and deaths are well recorded. When our research is concentrated in this zone it may be hard to understand why some people insist on complete and accurate source citations and written research reports.

And when we run into a problem in which everyone is NOT where they're supposed to be, when one census entry is missing and the other has wrong names and ages, and the necessary marriages just aren't there or involve the wrong people -- well, it can feel a lot like running full speed into a brick wall (even though Chris Staats makes a good case for abandoning that metaphor).

Citations and written reports and habits of skepticism are not about snobbery. They're more like genealogy insurance policies for that inevitable day when our ancestors enter the Dark Ages or otherwise suddenly become inscrutable.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Back in the day, my basic research plan was the same for every problem: look for whatever on the internet, download it, and dissect its parts into my genealogy database. This can work -- not all genealogy questions are difficult to answer.

But often it doesn't work. Or it gets a wrong answer. In that case we need to step back and make an actual plan. I suggest three steps:

(1) Ask a particular question about a particular known person in a specific place and time. Not "I want to know all about Grandma." But something like, "Who were the parents of Tryphena Burton?" or "Did she have a sister Tryphosa?"

(2) Look for the records that may tell you the answer in so many words ("direct evidence"), such as a birth or death certificate, a marriage application, a pension application, or a compiled genealogy. The exact records you can hope to find will vary a lot from place to place and time to time. One checklist I like just runs through a basic dozen common categories: church, cemetery, census, compiled, court, land, military, naturalization, newspaper, probate, tax, and vital. There are plenty of others, and this is where it pays to become well acquainted with each locality.

Often step 2 produces records that disagree with each other. That's another post one of these days.

(3) If these and other sources don't tell you the answer and don't even supply you with a nice juicy contradiction, then start looking for records that will give you clues. Actually you can start by looking again, more closely, at the records you've already collected. This is when some record types, like court and probate and land records, come into their own. They can show proximity and association and help you begin to sort out all the Burtons in the area, and identifying who were friends with which branches in which parts of the county.

In real life these steps may overlap. More experienced researchers will take the time to see more in any given record, and get more than the directly stated evidence from the start. But they won't assume that the answer requires prodigious effort in accumulating clues either, and skip right to that step.

Harold Henderson, "The research three-step," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 16 September 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Friday, September 13, 2013

Friday January 10, as part of the Association of Professional Genealogists' Professional Management Conference, "The Story of the Story of Jethro: The Making of an NGSQ Article":

Workshop Summary: A
finished article in a top-tier genealogy publication normally shows some ways
of cracking a tough research problem. But it necessarily omits much of the
research, writing, editing, and agonizing that went into its creation. Workshop
attendees will review and discuss the logic, structure, writing, omitted
research, and more of a recent article in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly. Not all professionals will write
for NGSQ or similar publications, but the writing and thought habits needed for
such articles make it other genealogical writing and editing easier.

One day during the week of January 13-17, as part of the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy's Advanced Evidence Practicum, a western Pennsylvania problem from the 1800s: finding parents by analyzing and correlating evidence to prove or disprove a family story.

I searched for my wife's ancestor Lewis Bassett. Find A Grave returned 38 people of that name. BillionGraves returned 3,102, most of whom were named something else, such as Lucy Bassett. (Users of certain commercial services will have experienced this same "search inflation.") With "exact match" turned on, BillionGraves returned zero for this search.

I searched for my ancestor William Thrall. Find A Grave returned 48 people of that name. BillionGraves returned 206, many of whom were named something else. With "exact match" turned on, BillionGraves returned six men for this search.

Finally, I searched Jane Smith. Find A Grave found 3550 of that name. BillionGraves, whose search engine in general ran much more slowly, produced "error" messages.

So I searched for Jane Smith in Illinois. Find A Grave found 128. BillionGraves found 945, most of whom were Smiths with other given names than Jane. With "exact match" turned on, BillionGraves found two women in Illinois. One them, a Jane Smith who died in Woodside (Sangamon County) in 1825, was not on Find A Grave.

I was playing hooky anyway, so these are the only searches I did.

When I need a global search, I'll use both services, while recognizing that my chances of finding a potentially relevant connection are very much better on the older one. And, once in the right county, I'll check for local resources, both on line and in print.

Monday, September 9, 2013

At least one part of my attraction to genealogy was a taste for neatness (not, however, expressed so much in my workspace). There's a special satisfaction in putting people in their right places with their own children in the right order, and so forth. And many of us are on a quest to find the very best way of putting people in order, either via new genealogy databases or new numbering systems.

Basically I think this is a harmless impulse -- until it comes to the research process. It has taken me a long time to realize that there is no ideal arrangement for evidence as it comes in.

The truth is exactly the opposite. The harder the case, the more evidence there is, quarried from many different kinds of sources at many different times. And it can be easy to miss the implications of deeds, court appearances, and the like for other genealogical facts. It can also be easy to miss the patterns that may be hidden in the mass of material.

That's why a fresh eye on the subject (friend or hired hand) can help. It's also why we should not succumb to neatness too soon. We need to think of as many different ways as possible to rearrange and summarize the evidence, to compare and contrast once each piece has been analyzed. Chapter 5 of Mastering Genealogical Proof is the best reference I know to the main ways to do this, but it is not exhaustive.

Rearranging actual furniture is a lot of work. Rearranging evidence is more like making a little map of the living room and shifting furniture tokens around on it. Exhaustive research has shown that there is no ideal way of arranging our living room. Similarly, the only (temporarily) ideal way of arranging our evidence is the way that helps us see new patterns and connections and gaps within it.

Friday, September 6, 2013

Trying to pinpoint a landless research target in the 1850 census between his landowning neighbors, I realized I needed to see if they were also neighbors in the agriculture schedule -- and made a note to check those records next time I visited a library that held them. Then I remembered which century it is, and typed "Ancestry nonpopulation schedules" into Google -- much easier than trying to locate them within Ancestry -- and discovered that their on-line holdings of these underused resources have grown.

Still nothing for Indiana or Wisconsin, but the 1850-1880 agriculture schedules for most counties in Illinois, Michigan and Ohio, can be browsed (at the township level, which is pretty quick) or searched. A total of 21 states are listed, including also Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and New York.

Harold Henderson, "I almost went to the library by accident: agriculture schedules," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 September 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

So far my plans to do more writing and less talking have not borne fruit. But I'm happy to be speaking in three places this fall:

Wednesday September 11, 6:30 pm CDT, at the on-line meeting of the Indiana chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists on "Three Ways to Improve Your Speaking Ideas," a shorter version of the talk I gave at FGS with the sponsorship of the Genealogical Speakers Guild. Check the IChap web site at the above link for information on joining or being a guest that evening.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

The Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy was the first institute I ever attended, back in January 2009. If it hadn't been for a last-minute reminder post on an email list, I would have missed it. I've been back every year but one since then, and I'll combine being a student and a teacher this coming January.

Harold Henderson, "Salt Lake Institute early birds fly away at the end of next month," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 September 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]